What am I doing wrong? Attention from men

[Treetopssofee]

WTF

I'm a happily invisible to men menopausal woman.

Until the last month or so! Men are paying me attention and I don't know why, I don't like it, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what I've done to unwittingly encourage it.

What am I doing wrong? I like the safety of being irrelevant and invisible and unfuckable. For context I was a very early "developed" tween and got a lot of unwanted attention from grown men which I've been delighted to age out of.

I don't make it my job to make small talk with performatively lonely looking older men in coffee shops

I don't make myself small for man splainers.

I don't laugh at shit jokes

I don't step out of the way first on footpaths

I’m so used to being invisible (fat middle aged) that any friendly direct engagement from an unknown bloke is weird to me.

I do know genuinely kindhearted nice (younger) blokes though, so I like to think if a man is genuinely giving me the time of day, it probably is benign. But I don’t fawn, I just interact with them like I would a nice woman I don’t know.

And it's not unreasonable to suspect festish COULD be a reason (e.g. when pregnant women can get unwanted festish attention, maybe some do when they're older too?) and a woman wondering if there's something like that going does NOT mean they enjoy or want it

I do not

Being wanted by men is an unsafe state to be in, I do NOT want it to be that just because I'm asking the question

Thank you for acknowledging the phenomenon of gaining invisibility from men, I don't know why some of these posters bother reading the feminism section if they believe what they're telling me about how all men are just naturally polite and lovely to women they don't want to fuck or use for women's emotional or physical labour in some way!

Learnt hazard awareness

Like I said, I had more than my fill of unwanted male attention in my youth. When you've had to scan a room for predators, you keep noticing... even when you've stopped being the prey

Could they think you're trans?

So why exactly do YOU think all these men who are suddenly paying you soooo much attention are doing so @Treetopssofee ?

People have given a number of suggestions, but you're not really listening.

Has your hair grown? I am 62 and notice that men eye me up on tube escalators or offer to carry my suitcase or generally see me when my hair is longer. As soon as it gets cut I am invisible again until it's just past my shoulders.

Exactly that

I never stopped noticing my surroundings. I noticed when men stopped noticing me. I noticed how much easier I moved through the world after that happened. I still noticed them NOT noticing me.

And I've noticed that something has changed.

I'm listening but I still haven't been told where the off switch is

Do you have any suggestions about how I can unsubscribe and go back to my invisible life?. I preferred it

I noticed people of both sexes aged 24-34 flirting with me once I was middle aged. It may be romantics imagining a soul connection against all odds. Run a mile.

It can also be the summer creeping into old bones. They want someone to clink glasses with and then unroll a discreet blanket in a posh park.

Yeah maybe

I don't do any tweakments, maybe people are a bit less used to naturally aging women's faces?

But I don't think I'm that unusual looking. Friends my age are split about 50/50 between natural aging and tweaking

I think men never stop. I used to think they stopped.

It happens when you're driving? Perhaps it's the car they like the look of. What do you drive and have you changed it recently?

My nose hair has.

My head hairstyle has been the same for the last 10 years except for a brief attempt at a "do" that I quickly grew back out to my go to lazy style

It's medium long, below shoulders but in a low maintenance way

They take it in rounds or divvy up the flirting labour.

Maybe men in their 40s and teens-20s are hitting on women in their teens and 20s. Men in their 30s and 50s are going older or same age.

Nope. I'm attached to my lil unremarkable analogue car and won't upgrade to a computer on wheels

It's not old enough to be interesting. A standard "mum car" but like mum cars 15 years ago, not the massive school run cars you see these days

Interesting

They were at least leaving me alone then

Maybe they were doing Pandemic Languishing too disconsolately to zing on your radar.

Have I aged out of the sweet spot?

I stopped looking young

But now I'm old enough to be a potential nurse or a purse?

And the relief of being neither was only temporary 😞

You haven't lost weight? I guess you would have mentioned it if you had but just in case. It's a major remover of the invisibility cloak.

Unsubscribe from what?

Pheromones. The ones produced during menopause. I was invisible all my life until then.
Suddenly I become visible. Men would stop in their tracks to look at me, smile at me, see me! Why! ?!
I'm not sure where you are on the menopause journey but this part was strange.
At the same time I was aware that my body was wanting a last chance to procreate, so that's why I assumed it was giving off stronger signals/pheromones.

You sound like you have a lot that you need to heal from because this isn’t a healthy view of men

No but it's VERY like that experience
Remarkably similar

(I was obese after my toughest pregnancy for a few years, so experienced the phenomenon of losing it and then being "re-humanised" of for example, bus drivers suddenly having change if I needed it, and the postman giving me time to get to the door, and not being passed over for work opportunities)

It's exactly like that

But my weight hasn't changed at all I'm recent years. Nor do I enjoy recreational shopping soy clothes haven't changed much

It's not a healthy state of affairs
It's not un-true either